by Jeff Long
The moon came and went. Molly found herself nodding off in short bursts.
A hand slapped the top of her seat. Molly started.
“It’s coming,” Luke said. “Tell him.”
“We’re there?” She peered out the window. “How can you see anything?”
“Are you going to tell him or not?” Luke reached over the front seat and stabbed at Vin’s ribs. It hurt, Molly could tell. Vin bared his gold teeth and stepped on the brakes. A swirl of dust enveloped them.
“Did I say stop?” said Luke. “Go off up there.”
“Sit back,” Duncan said to him.
Luke’s arm withdrew. The backseat creaked under his weight. Vin gripped the steering wheel, angry at being prodded. At last he flipped on his one good headlight.
There was only the red dirt of the highway and high, green grasses. The grass enclosed them. Slowly Molly made out a dark mass in the distance, the sloping hip of a mountain, or an upward march of trees. In either case, nothing but wilderness.
“We keep going,” said Luke.
“Going where?” said Duncan.
The truck arrived behind them in the moonlight. It approached with the immensity of a shipwreck, its tattered canopy flailing like a torn sail. Bald car tires wired to the prow served as a bumper.
Vin went on sucking his golden front teeth, making up his own mind.
A fingernail tapped at her window. Molly cranked the handle, and her reflection became Kleat. “Lost?” he said.
Samnang’s round face appeared behind Kleat, a creased brown melon with white hair.
“There’s a road,” said Luke. “It goes through the grass.”
“An invisible road,” scoffed Duncan.
“What are you saying?” Kleat asked.
“Turn around now,” said Duncan, “we can be back in Phnom Penh for breakfast.”
“Turn around?” said Molly.
“Look for yourself, there’s nothing out there.” He wiped his hand across the map.
Luke didn’t argue. He had switched off, tuned out. It was their decision.
Kleat fumed. “If it was in plain sight, they would have been found already. Sometimes you have to dig a little further, that’s all.”
Molly didn’t see Samnang slide away. He simply appeared in the light beam, moving up the road, hitching his false leg ahead. One by one they all quit talking.
His shadow reached in front of him, long black lines like puppet strings tied to each limb. He followed the edge of the highway, peering into the overgrown ditch. Fifty yards ahead he stopped and began parting the grasses.
Everyone got out and went up the road, all except Luke. He sat in the car, knowing whatever he knew.
Samnang was working deeper into the tall grasses, feeling along with his one good foot. “A track for oxcarts,” he announced to them. “It hasn’t been used for many years.”
The three brothers descended from the highway and joined Samnang, chattering away, eager to continue. They wanted a week of wages, not taxi fare for a night ride. They churned through the grass, trampling it flat and tying bunches at their tops as landmarks.
Abruptly the night detonated around them. A clamor filled the air. It sizzled and crackled like wild voltage, loud, almost tangible.
The suddenness and volume startled Molly. She whirled around, searching for a source, but the noise pressed in from every direction. Cicadas, she realized, thousands of them.
She’d never heard such a massed voice of insects. She registered it as anger, but that was only because it was so alien to her. She stepped back from the grass.
That suddenly the noise stopped.
The silence had a slight sucking vacuum to it. Molly felt pulled by it. “What was that?” she said.
The men had frozen. They were staring at the grass on all sides of them.
Then Kleat waved at the night. “Bugs. Nothing.”
The clouds opened to the moon, and the distant mountain revealed itself as a pile of low hills crowned with dense forest.
“Okay?” Kleat said. “It’s there. The man said it was there. There it is.”
Molly gazed up at the mountain.
“An oxcart path,” Duncan said, dismissing it. “A mountain.”
Kleat was having none of it. He grabbed a handful of grass and gave a fierce yank. It was a foolish gesture. The roots were deep and this was saw grass, with firm, sharp blades. His fist slid up and came away empty. Kleat snapped his teeth in pain and opened his cut palm. When he shook his hand, drops of his blood spattered into the dust like petite explosions.
They followed the oxcart path. The convoy climbed through grass growing higher than the doors. The grass stroked the windows like fingers of seaweed. Behind them, the truck’s headlights swam through an ocean of brilliant green lines.
Their pell-mell highway dash slowed to a crawl. The path was rutted and winding and hard to see, but it rose gently. The shovels and jerry cans piled in the rear quit clattering. They merely rustled at the curves. Molly could practically feel the grass slithering along the undercarriage.
She relaxed, grateful for the quiet and the sinuous path. With each looping turn, the moon shifted in the sky. It seemed to have grown to twice its normal size, as if they were rising off the planet.
“We’re farther north than I thought,” said Duncan. “We’re reaching into the Annamite range. The mountains run all the way to China. It’s wild country. The lowlanders stay clear of it. The hill tribes live up here pretty much the way they have for ten thousand years, taking animals, throwing down a little corn between the trees.”
“History,” whispered Luke.
At three-thirty they crested a ridgetop and stopped. Ahead stood all that remained of a bridge, a single stone pillar rising from the wide riverbed. Beyond that, higher up, a tall forest took over the grassland.
“Now where?” said Duncan.
They got out, except for Luke, who once again left them to their own conclusions. Molly faced back the way they had come, expecting their path to be flattened by the tires. But the grass had folded shut behind them. They would have to hunt their way down just as carefully.
To her surprise, the logging road lay far below them. Winding back and forth, they’d ascended hundreds of vertical feet. From this height, you could see moonlit paddy fields far to the west, and curious rows of ponds. They were not ponds, she realized, but bomb craters.
Kleat paced along the riverbed rim like a trapped tiger. “We’re close,” he said. “It’s right there in front of us.”
“It’s just a forest,” said Duncan.
“It’s cover,” said Kleat. “It makes sense. We’re looking for the remains of an armored cavalry unit.”
“How do you know that?” asked Molly.
“Who do you think the Blackhorse Regiment was? The Eleventh Armored Cavalry. They were famous, George Patton’s men. ‘Find the bastards and pile on,’ his orders. Nine men, Luke said. That would have been enough to crew two tanks or armored personnel carriers. That’s what we’re looking for. Anything that large, left in the open, would have been spotted by plane or satellite years ago. I don’t know how these guys got lost. But those trees are where they went.”
“Not across that bridge, they didn’t,” Duncan said.
“Why not? Bombs were falling like rain all through this area. Our pilot was returning from a run along this very borderland. Sometime after the Blackhorse soldiers crossed over, the bridge must have caught a bomb. That would explain why they never got out.”
“Except the bridge is too primitive,” Duncan said. “See these stones? It was a cantilever design. That dates it to a thousand years ago, or earlier. A bridge like that couldn’t have taken the weight of a tank. And look at how the building stones have been shoved down-river over time. Some of them are huge. No, this fell to pieces centuries ago.”
“The closer we get, the less you care,” Kleat said. “Or are you afraid of something?”
Molly stood away from th
em. The night air was a joy to breathe. She actually felt cold in her sundress.
“Even if they got across thirty years ago, it doesn’t mean we should follow them,” Duncan said. “Look at the width of that riverbed. It carries some major water. Once the rains begin, we’ll never be able to cross back. We’d be stuck over there for the next six months. And that, not a bombed bridge, would explain why they were never seen again.”
“I don’t see any rain.”
“It’s coming.”
“June 23, 1970,” Kleat said to him. “That’s the day they went missing. They were part of the Cambodian incursion. Nixon sent them. That’s what Kent State was all about.”
“I remember.”
“Somehow these nine soldiers got separated from the main body. Maybe night was coming on. The enemy was out there. They couldn’t stay in the open.”
“And you think they drove this far north? We’re halfway to Laos.”
“Maybe they were going for the high ground. Maybe they saw the trees. Maybe they were being pursued.”
Molly left them arguing. The night, the dark morning, was too fine to spoil. Venus stood bright. The constellations beckoned. For a month, swamped by haze on the plains, she had missed the stars. Down there, in another couple of hours, the dawn people would be plundering the site, dodging through the mist. Up here, she felt free. She clutched her arms across her chest and meandered along the broad rim.
At first she didn’t notice the strange ribbing under her shoes. It rose out of the ground only gradually. At last the notches threatened to trip her. She bent to run her fingers across the imprints and they were as hard as ceramic.
“Duncan,” she called. “Kleat.”
They were arguing. She called louder.
“What?” said Kleat.
She showed them the marks on the ground.
Kleat had a six-battery bludgeon of a flashlight. He shined it on the rows of corrugated imprints, each the same fourteen or fifteen inches wide, leading off like dinosaur footprints. The track marks ran a hundred yards before sinking back into the earth. The clay had captured the passage of vehicles. The sun had baked it and made it impervious to three decades of weather.
“Blackhorse,” Kleat said. He identified the prints as the marks of two armored cavalry assault vehicles, ACAVs, both the same size, one following the other.
“They came this way, up the hill, along the river, chasing a way to cross without the bridge. What more do you need?” he said to Duncan. “They’re over there. They’re waiting.”
12.
They came to the pass where the stream spread across the wide riverbed, and the Eleventh Cavalry strays had left more prints in the clay. The water, at the deepest point, came axle high to the Land Cruiser, though it built against Molly’s door on the upstream side, slapping and gurgling. The moon made a skin of silver on it. Dangling her hand out the window, she found the water had the temperature of blood or bathwater.
“It’s got to be one of these drainages,” Duncan muttered at his map. She could hear him back there, twisting the paper to try to fit it to the terrain. Couldn’t he see the handle of the Big Dipper, the stars skipping up to the North Star? They weren’t lost, only in motion.
She closed her eyes and, midstream, they seemed adrift on a raft. Her feet were wet, and she saw an inch of water on the floor. She laughed.
“You’re happy,” said Duncan.
She didn’t turn. “Yes,” she said.
It pleased him. That pleased her.
She didn’t try to explain her joy. After all these weeks, she felt released. The tension of searching for the pilot, the pushing and pulling of tool against earth, of man against man, civilian against soldier, of Kleat against Duncan, all of it seemed left behind. Her trespass upon the pilot, with her camera, was a thing of the past. The highway and its dark menace were forgotten.
The sun would find them somewhere. That was the heart of it. The farther they got from the main road, the more it felt like she was finally reaching a center. When the time came, one way or another they could always retrace their journey, and eventually she could return to writing her words, publishing her photos, and promoting her name, the maiden name—the only name she knew—of a woman who had forsaken her. For now, she just wanted to keep going.
The river—or her happiness—changed Duncan, too. His anxieties fell away. He put aside his map, and she thought that now they could cast themselves into the journey. They had made their crossing. Their hell-bent midnight ride could slow. She could start to know Duncan without the background noise and her urgency to catch the recovery team’s story. They were on their own now, threading up a path across a river that was just a stream upon a mountain that was just a hill, wandering off the maps. Two searchers, that’s who they were.
The bones were an excuse. That divorced her and him from Kleat, who was so bound to his dead and his duty. She hadn’t come to resurrect soldiers any more than Duncan had. The missing pilot had drawn them as a novelty, an opportunity, nothing more. Now they could enter a territory of the heart.
They had never talked about what preceded Cambodia for him. For a month, they had worked and lived within inches of each other, but she still didn’t have a real handle on him. For all his tales of high school football and a dog named Bandit and his summer-long Harley solo to Anchorage and special barbecue recipes and favorite old movies, she had no idea why he’d landed here, or even when. The one time she’d asked, he’d dodged. Sometimes it feels like I was born here, he’d said. Like I’m like some dusty thing out of a Kipling novel, just one more relic of the empire.
Not Kipling, she thought. Conrad. And not Kurtz, not Heart of Darkness, but Lord Jim. Duncan had secrets, maybe dark secrets or sad secrets or old guilt. One does not go to the jungle out of innocence. He never talked about a wife or children or another woman, never crouched over snapshots of a lost family or a lover who had chosen a different man or died a tragic death. He never mentioned where that part of his life had gone. Survivor guilt, she guessed. Maybe that was what attracted her to him. He seemed to carry her same sense of a past best unrepeated, of a voyage without anchors. Like an orphan, he acted never quite worthy of love. They were perfect fodder for a grail quest, the two of them.
They passed worn blocks of stone in the river wall, evidence of ancient channels. That perked him up.
“Incredible,” he said. “We’re looking at water control that predates the Angkor kingdom by centuries, and on the opposite side of the country. A massive hydraulics system in the mountains, for Pete’s sake. You need to understand, water is everything here. There’s not another country like this on earth. For the Khmers, the world is water. When the monsoon comes, almost half the country vanishes under water. The Tonle Sap River reverses course. Great battles were fought on inland boats. Their civilization was founded on wet rice cultivation. The Angkor empire rose and fell based on their ability to control water. The Angkor kings captured the rain in huge pools and would dole it out in drought years or choke their enemies with thirst. But where did the Angkor genius come from? What sparked their greatness? Who passed to them the divine mandate? Who came before them?”
Luke would have muttered “history” had he been conscious. But he had gone to sleep or was traveling in his head. His eyes were shut. Perhaps his delirium had cycles, or the loss of his secret had emptied him. Hibernation suited him, Molly decided. He looked younger without the junkie eyes. Asleep, he looked resigned to himself.
Trailed by the hulking Mercedes, they wound higher along the contour lines. The moon spun left to right across the windshield, a moving target. Molly let go of the urge to orient herself. There was no longer any question of where they were headed.
The prow of the forest seemed to descend to them. White mist leaked from the throat of the trees. Early morning fog was part of the Cambodian clockwork. But tonight it looked to Molly like a word exhaled, like a syllable spilling downhill to greet her.
To the right and lef
t, creeper vines stitched shut the forest wall. The only possible entry was directly through a break in the screen of trees. She wanted to ask Vin to stop for a picture. But that would have meant setting up a tripod for a time-lapse shot, and it would have been more an emotion than a picture anyway.
“It will be a whole other world in there,” Duncan said. “An ecosystem writing its own rules. You’ll see. There are species in these mountains that no one knows exist. The khiting vor, practically a unicorn, like a myth, part gazelle with curlicue horns. They say it stands on its rear legs to feed, that it eats deadly snakes. There are herds of white elephants, like ghosts. Peacocks. Langur monkeys with two stomachs. Hundreds of species of moths. And the flowers.”
Teak and gum trees soared. He knew them by shape, and by their Khmer names, too. They reached the outskirts of the fog, and it turned to brilliant milky smoke in their beams. Vin slowed, feeling his way forward. But they had their bearings now, that gaping hole in the forest.
Something tapped against the rooftop. A leaf. A twig.
“What about tigers?”
“These days you see more pelts than paw marks,” Duncan said. “The hill tribes and ex-soldiers are trapping them out. It’s obscenely easy. They take an old land mine, hide it under a dead monkey for bait, and boom, jackpot. Skin, meat, claws, and penis…you can make enough money for a Honda Dream. That’s the bike of choice here. The tiger parts go to China for folk medicine.”
Another story, another time, she idly thought.
“I wouldn’t worry about the big cats. Not this deep. They’ve never bothered me. This far from people, they don’t have a taste for us.”
There was another soft pat on the roof, a light rap, an ounce of pebble, less. Then another. Molly glanced at the ceiling. Another. Tiptoes on the metal.
She frowned, wishing the noises away, guessing what they were.
“It can’t be,” she stated firmly. “Tell me it’s not starting.”
But it was. Duncan had his fingers against the roof, feeling the minute landings. “The luck,” he said.
The season had beat them.